THE ballad known under the title The Maid Freed from the Gallows is known not only from the collection of Child but also from the classical treatise of F. B. Gummere, in which it is used with great skill to prove the author's well-known theory of ballad origins.' In that ballad, a girl condemned to die on the gallows, we are not told why, calls upon her father and her mother to rescue her, but in vain. Finally she calls on her 'own true love,' who without hesitation pays the ransom (or bribe) and thus frees the victim. We are not told, of course, of any consequences of this peculiar interference with the king's justice. In this form, the ballad reads like a commonplace document relating an event of a type that cannot have been uncommon in Merry Old England in the long period that lies between the Norman Conquest and the end of the eighteenth century. Suffice it to recall a scene in the opening chapter of Sir Walter Scott's admirable Heart of Mid-Lothian, supposed to have occurred in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early part of the reign of George ii. What puts us on our guard is the significant fact that the same ballad has been found elsewhere, with noteworthy variations.2 Closely related to the ballad is an English folk-tale from Yorkshire, derived, probably, from some ballad version, as may be inferred from the verses interspersed in the prose text.3 In this version, a girl is to be hanged for having lost a golden ball. Standing at the foot of the gallows, she invokes her mother, then her father, and lastly her brother, all in vain. At long last her lover appears, who has succeeded in getting hold of the lost ball, at the risk of his own life. He presents it to the judges and thus saves her life. In a German ballad from Westphalia, a girl, in the power of a mysterious 'skipper' and in danger of death, successively implores her father, her brother, and her love to rescue her. The two former refuse to sell their purple coats to save her life. Her lover sells his own person (apparently because he has no purple coat or anything else of value), and thus redeems her.4 The rationalist method of interpreting the old ballad poetry was ready at hand with the suggestion that the mysterious 'skipper' is simply a pirate who has abducted the heroine. Unfortunately, this explanation failed to explain why the girl's life should be in danger: pirates were certainly not in the habit of slaying their fair victims but preferred to sell them at a handsome profit. This rationalist explanation was suggested in the first place by a Sicilian ballad printed in 1874.5 There a young woman is abducted by Tunisian pirates on the